


his were the hands

by lifeofsnark



Category: Hell on Wheels (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Compliant, Competency Kink, Cunnilingus, F/M, Fingering, Lily gets her dance, So much angst, THEY'RE BOTH SO SOFT, They're so tan and COMPETENT, a story in vignettes, an ode to Cullen's hands, let's call it what it is, p in v, sex outside
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 12:37:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20209870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeofsnark/pseuds/lifeofsnark
Summary: “You owe me a dance,” she blurted out, turning to face him eye to eye.One of his eyebrows slid up. “Don’t remember promising you one.”“And yet you owe me all the same,” said Lily, resting her empty hand on his shoulder. “Can you waltz, Mr. Bohannon?”He sighed and shook his head, but rested his hand on her back anyway. “Yeah,” he said shortly. “I can waltz.”OR: The one where Cullen and Lily come together in a series of stolen moments. It isn't perfect, but perfect isn't what either of them need: all they're looking for is someone to hold on to.





	1. Chapter 1

_ Now take my hand and hold it tight _

_ I will not fail you here tonight _

_ For failing you I fail myself _

_ And place my heart upon a shelf _

_ In hell’s library without a light _

_ I will not fail you here tonight. _

_ -Dean Koontz _

* * *

Sometimes it amazed Cullen that his hands could still wash clean. 

Ten thousand Confederate casualties had fallen in the godforsaken Wilderness of central Virginia. Ten thousand Rebs and fifteen thousand Feds and maybe two dozen surgeons between them. 

He’d had a field kit and a strong stomach and had spent three days holding down patients for the surgeon’s bloody saw. When he’d staggered into the woods to sleep, and another day later had roused enough to crawl to the stream, he didn’t think his hands would ever come clean. 

Then he’d buried his family in deep-dug graves in the dark, musty soil of the Mississippi flood plain. Two graves and three bodies, six foot deep. His palms had blistered and burst and bled, near-black mud worked its way deep under his fingernails, and Cullen could still smell the tang of blood in his nose, but after all that-

His hands could still scrub up, unmarked by the horrors they’d held. 

~~~

“Shouldn’t be here,” said Cullen, raising the whiskey bottle to his lips. 

Maybe he could drink himself to death. That was a hell of a thought: he’d survived the war without a single major wound. He’d survived one memorable duel, Indian attacks, being sentenced to hang, and Elam boxing him to the floor. All that, only for Cullen Bohannon to finally be felled by a bottle. 

“Hmm,” said Lily, sitting down beside him on the steps to his rail car. (Never felt like his. Just another roof, just another stop on his road to perdition.) “I believe you said something like that the night we met. Do you remember?”

“Ma’am,” said Cullen, taking another pull of the fire and smoke. “I don’t remember my wife’s face no more. Don’t take it personal if I don’t remember meeting you.”

“You’d cut open my shoulder,” said Lily, taking off her flat-brimmed hat and hooking it on the railing. In the weak light of the half-moon her hair gleamed almost silver. “And then patched me up again.” 

“Mhmm.” That Cullen remembered. He could recall how pale she’d been; how when he’d caught sight of how much blood was staining her dress he’d marveled that she was alive at all. “You got a couple good smacks in before Joseph held you down.”

“It hurt,” said Lily simply, and Cullen thought he could hear a smile in her voice. He didn’t deserve her smiles. Not now, not ever. 

“Bet it did,” he said after a too-long pause. 

“Mr. Bohannon, you told me that I didn’t belong on the railroad; that I was neither whore nor squaw.”

Cullen leaned to his left and let the wrought iron railing hold up the weight of his spinning head. “Ma’am, you picked the wrong day to try and get an apology out of me.” 

“It’s not an apology I’m after. I wanted to say that you were wrong about where I belonged then, and you’re wrong about it now.”

It took a minute for her meaning to filter through Cullen’s sluggish mind. She shouldn’t be with him here in the dark; shouldn’t flaunt her fall from propriety any more than she had to. Not that he considered her fallen. No, Lily Bell with her straight white smile and honest determination was far above them all.

“Fair enough,” he told her, and turned the amber bottle of whiskey in his hands. The camp was settling in for the night, about as quiet as it ever got. Out in the tall grass the breeze was rustling, and frogs were singing down by the river. 

“I’m sorry about Doctor Whitehead,” she said quietly, her voice low and smoky in the silence between them. “You knew him before the war?”

“Yep,” said Cullen. “Delivered my babies. Set my arm when I fell off my horse. He was a good man.” _ He was a good man, _ went the unspoken addendum, _ and today I killed him. _

“What happened?” asked Lily, like she was afraid the question itself could hurt him. (She was right.) “How did he end up ...here?”

“War happened,” said Cullen, and he took another swig of whiskey. He was starting to go numb, starting to lose his grip in his fingers and the ability to keep himself upright and straight. 

Lily took the bottle from him and took a swallow herself. Idly Cullen noticed that gone was the priss from the 40 Mile celebration, the one who’d hoped for champagne. This Lily (a little more freckled, a little less hopeful, a lot more reckless) could drink whiskey with only the smallest of grimaces as the liquor burned its way down.

“You didn’t look,” she said. “Up on the hill.”

Cullen let his eyes fall shut, hoping that if he didn’t see her, she’d stop talking. (He was reminded, so distantly that it couldn’t even hurt, that his son had once thought that if he pulled the blankets up over his head ghosts couldn’t find him.)

“Some things a man doesn’t want to see.” He didn’t want to remember his old friend covered in his own blood and brains. He wanted to remember him as he was: alive and honorable. 

Cullen tried to pluck the whiskey out of her grasp but she stopped him, holding tight to the bottle before setting it down out of reach. “I’m sorry,” she said again, taking his hand in hers. 

He stared down at the dim shadows that were their joined hands resting in her lap. Her hand was warm and soft and so- so _ thin _in his, as lightweight as the head of a rose and just as easily crushed. 

“You shouldn’t- we shouldn’t-” Clumsily, his brain buzzing, Cullen tried to separate his fingers from hers. 

Lily retaliated by covering their joined hands with her free one. 

“Why not?” she asked, her voice crisp and confident. She was a challenge, was Mrs. Lily Bell, the Fair Haired Maiden of the West. Cullen wondered if she’d ever done the easy thing; if she’d ever done what others had expected of her. 

She was trouble. 

So was he.

“Why would you want to?” Cullen asked. Before she could put together an answer, he decided to tell her himself. “Lily, I killed a man with that hand today. I pulled the trigger, and then I dug the grave. I’ve dug so many graves I’ve lost count, and I’ve killed more men than I’ve buried. I’ve helped hold men down as the surgeon cut off arms and legs and hands; I’ve plotted ambushes and burned bridges and-” inside him, the tirade of bewildered grief cut off. He was at capacity: exhausted by his life, by the liquor, by his own stubborn determination to get up again every morning. 

“You survived, Mr. Bohannon,” she said, her voice a benediction, a baptism, a blessing. “And you went on.”

“Some people-” he swallowed thickly, trying to speak around the lump in his throat. “Some people are past saving.”

“How many lives does it take, then?” Lily asked, as logical and ruthless as ever. “How many sins does it take to make a soul too tarnished for redemption?”

“Lily-”

“I’d like to know,” she said, still looking straight ahead over the tall, endless grasses of the prairie. “I have a vested interest, you see.”

Her profile was perfect, serene and cool in the moonlight. Little curls were flying loose around her face, a halo in the making, and the end of her nose turned ever so slightly up: it was both girlish and high-class, a contradiction that interested Cullen more than it really should. 

When he caught himself staring at her lips he had to force himself to turn away. 

“S’not like that,” he said, wishing she’d give him his whiskey back. “The things I’ve done-”

“I killed that brave,” Lily interrupted, turning to look at him now, her bright eyes gone navy along with the night. “It wasn’t Robert. The brave had already killed Robert, so I pulled the arrow out of my own shoulder and forced it through his soft palate. I’ve lain with men outside of matrimony; I’ve lied- huge lies, Cullen. Ones that I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling a year ago.”

_ She’d called him Cullen. _“Mrs. Bell- Lily-”

“I had an abortion.”

That pulled him up short. He’d never thought on it, but it was easy enough to picture her with a tow-headed baby on her hip, one with her cupids bow mouth and bouncing curls. 

“I don’t remember much of my Bible, but I reckon that wasn’t in it,” he ventured, his voice low. Her fingers were still in his, so he rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand. The skin was soft there, impossibly so, and Cullen had the dizzying sensation of holding something precious in his hands. 

“I don’t know if it is or not,” said Lily. “My parents weren’t much for the Church. Some are saying it’s murder. Some don’t. I don’t know what to think. 

“I realized I was pregnant just after Robert accepted the post to come west nearly four years ago. I was to come with him, you see, and a baby- something so small, and helpless-”

She trailed off, her voice quiet and halting, almost like she was talking to herself. Cullen found himself leaning closer to her, his fingers holding her own more tightly. 

“I bought tincture of pennyroyal and drank it on a Friday. I finally stopped bleeding ten days later.”

_ “Jesus,” _Cullen murmured. (It was a curse on behalf of her pain. It was a prayer in the face of her bravery.)

“So, Mr. Bohannon. I may not have a record as impressive as yours, but you aren’t the only one to worry over the redeemability of one’s soul.”

“Ah, hell,” he muttered, and then pulled her against him. She was soft and warm, and that scared him too. 

Idly, Lily traced over the back of his knuckles, her fingers cresting the knotted bone of his joints and down into the softer valleys between. 

“Mrs. Bell- Lily- I ain’t got nothing for you. Only thing I can bring you is suffering. Everything I touch I break.”

She didn’t stop tracing her fingers across the fighting-thickened knuckles of his hand. “I don’t believe that’s true.”

“Couldn’t farm on fertile land. Couldn’t be a family man, and didn’t win the war. Hell,” Cullen added, laughing into the drunken spins that were sloshing in his brain, “If the government ever wants this road built they outta take me right off it. Might be I’m cursed.” 

“You don’t really think that,” she said, stubborn as ever. 

“No,” said Cullen. “Guess I don’t. It’s easier, though.”

“Easier than what?”

Cullen turned his nose into her hair and breathed her in: salt and alkaline dust and under it all the simple and lovely scent of lavender. “Easier than thinking that I can’t stick,” he said finally. “That all I can do is fail.”

She didn’t feed him platitudes, and a part of him that had been holding itself dormant creaked to life within him. Instead, she flipped their hands so that the back of his palm rested over her breeches-clad thigh. “These hands,” she said. “You didn’t want me to hold them earlier because you’ve killed men, correct? Killed and buried them.”

“Yeah,” said Cullen slowly, wondering where she was taking this. He wasn’t drunk enough to handle her condemnation, and he wasn’t sober enough to accept her grace. 

“That’s not all these hands have done, Mr. Bohannon. You raised your son, didn’t you? And tended land. You healed my shoulder- your fingers were inside me even before we’d been properly introduced.”

He could hear her smirk, and for the first time in his thirty-eight years he actively wished for whiskey dick. _ Your fingers were inside me, _ Jesus Christ. Worst part was she seemed to know _ exactly _what she was doing to him. 

“You helped me lay my floor with these hands. I couldn’t stop looking at them, you know. Wide fingers, nicked and scarred skin. Hands used to work.”

Cullen wanted to ask if her academic husband’s hands had been smooth and soft, but he didn’t think that was appropriate. Not that anything about this conversation was appropriate, but still. Once upon a time he’d had pretty manners to offer the women in his life.

“You protected us from violent attack, you taught the freemen to shoot, and you fixed the mule engine with these hands. They’re a part of the whole. No escaping it.”

Cullent didn’t know what to say. She was offering him a lifeline, and all he had to do was grab hold and hang on. Cullen didn’t know what to say, so he raised her hand to his lips and kissed her soft fingertips one by one by one. 

~~~

_ What sound does hope make? _

Hope was the sound of bright music pouring out of the saloon on a Saturday night. Someone had found a fiddle, and one of the freemen had a banjo, and where there were Irishmen there was always someone with a song to sing. Lily could hear laughter and the rhythmic stamp of feet on the floor as those interested in dancing took their turns with the off-duty working girls. 

_ What does loneliness look like? _

Loneliness looked the the honey-yellow glow of the open saloon door. It looked like the checks of light streaming onto the hard-packed dirt of the street as Lily walked by, trying to walk off the tension that had been riding high in her shoulders all day. She missed Robert; missed having his steady, resolved presence all to herself at the end of the day. 

(Loneliness was standing companionless on the outside, looking in.)

Well, there was no reason she needed to remain that way. A drink would settle her nerves, and two might send her to sleep. Lily twitched her skirts out of the dust and set off again, enjoying the quick _ thump thump thump _her boots made as she marched up the wooden saloon steps. 

About six couples were whirling across the dance floor to a reel that was being played with more enthusiasm than musical harmony, and Lily smiled to herself as she skirted around the edge of the cleared saloon floor. Men stood around waiting for their turn with one of the camp wives or lightskirts, and several of them asked her to dance with varying degrees of hope and lust in their whiskey-fogged eyes. 

“Not tonight, gentlemen,” she said, managing to paste a smile on her face. There was community here; a shared tradition almost as old as America itself. There was no logical reason for her to feel so excluded from it, but she did, and the illogic of that reaction only fueled her feeling of melancholy. “I’m just stepping in for a nightcap.”

Two more men offered to cover her tab. She declined again. 

Mickey was tending bar, and she avoided eye contact when she dropped a few coins on the rough-hewn bartop. Mickey’s blue eyes had always seemed a little too perceptive, and far too judgemental. “Whiskey, please,” she said. 

He poured the drink in a heavy bar glass and passed it over. Since the forty-mile party she’d learned to swallow the cheap liquor down in one gulp. Her eyes still watered, but whose wouldn’t?

As the whiskey burned its way past her aching breastbone she turned to watch the dancers. The stable boss was dancing with his round little wife. Three of the working girls were dancing with men on the drop gang, and by the door Cullen was dancing with Eva. She was laughing up at him, and -_ lord help her, _the man had dimples. 

Had she ever seen Cullen smile that way before? She rather doubted it. 

Lily turned back to the bar and asked for another. This time she made the mistake of looking up at Mickey when he reached for the open bottle of Tennessee whiskey. “Makes me miss home, nights like this. Sure, even in the hardest times someone in town would hold a céilí for a wedding or a birth.”

“We’d dance in the parlor,” Lily murmured, looking from Mickey to the window. “I have three older sisters, and we’d fight about who had to dance the gentlemen’s part.” She smiled a little at that. She hoped Rose and Violet and Ivy were well and happy. They would be married now. Likely they were mothers. 

“It’s on me,” Mickey said as he passed her the glass. Then he poured one for himself and held it up, clicking it to hers. “To homes beyond the sea.”

Both of them tilted back their heads to let the whiskey wash down their throats, burning away all their unsaid thoughts of home. (Only in the far-flung reaches of the American West could an Irishman and an Englishwoman find common ground.)

As the tips of her fingers began to tingle and her stomach warmed, Lily decided that that was the worst part. She was homesick, plain and simple, but homesick for a place that no longer truly existed. She couldn’t go back to the family parlor. She couldn’t go back to the flat she’d shared with Robert in New York. No one could go back once they’d chosen their path. 

Time moved only one way, and she’d have to move with it. 

“Thank you for the drink,” Lily told Mickey as he lounged against the bar, lazily watching the dancers reeling across the floor. “And thank you for listening.” 

“Ah well, a barkeep is much like a priest,” said Mickey, flashing her a grin. “I figured if I couldn’t make my mam proud by being the one, I should try my hand at the other.”

Lily found herself smiling back. “Goodnight, Mr. McGinnes,” she said before working her way to the door. 

It was cooler outside, and Lily took in a deep breath before turning the corner of the building to walk back to her car. She’d wash, and-

“Lily! Mrs. Bell.” 

She knew that voice, knew the drawl that turned Mrs. to the mono-syllabic _ Miz. _

“Good evening, Mr. Bohannon,” she said, stopping and turning towards him. He was standing in one of the pools of light cast by the saloon windows, his eyes wide and cheeks pinked from dancing. He looked almost as surprised as she did that he’d stopped her. 

“Ah- the men have been drinking,” he told her. “Thought I’d walk you back.” 

“There’s no reason to cut your evening short on my account,” said Lily, raising an eyebrow. Something about the man made her defensive and painfully aware of her status as an outsider. It was the way he seemed to be comfortable anywhere: arguing numbers with Durant, swinging a hammer with the men, riding off into the wilderness with a rifle and his wits. He was a chameleon, and it made her feel her own femininity and nationality in stark relief.

“I’d had my turns,” he said, raising one shoulder in a shrug. “C’mon.”

He crossed the hard-packed dirt towards her and winged his elbow. The formal gesture was so out of place here that she almost laughed. “I do believe you’re drunk,” she told him. 

“'M feeling good,” he told her. “Saw you knock back a couple. Reckon you’re feeling pretty good, too.”

She was, actually. Her fingers were tingly, and her thoughts had slowed to that sunshine-crawl just distant enough from reality that nothing could hurt her. “I certainly don’t feel bad,” she told him conspiratorially. 

“That’s good,” he told her, the corner of his mouth curving up in amusement. “Let’s get you back to your car before that wears off.” He slid his hand down her arm to take her hand, and she wrapped her fingers around the worn strength of his palm. 

“You owe me a dance,” she blurted out, turning to face him eye to eye. 

One of his eyebrows slid up. “Don’t remember promising you one.”

“And yet you owe me all the same,” said Lily, resting her empty hand on his shoulder. “Can you waltz, Mr. Bohannon?”

He sighed and shook his head, but rested his hand on her back anyway. “Yeah,” he said shortly. “I can waltz.”

For the space of a few heartbeats they stood in each other’s arms, getting a feel for the triple meter spooling out of the open saloon window, and then they were moving, partnering each other as easily as if they’d been dancing all their lives. 

“You’re quite a good dancer,” said Lily, focusing on the air just to the right of Cullen’s ear. 

She could _ feel _the muscles in his shoulder tense in an aborted shrug. “Ain’t hard.”

He pulled her closer into a turn and she laughed as they whirled, grubby tents and distant stars swirling in the periphery of her vision. “Why did you come out after me?” she asked, more breathless than she ought to be. (It was his fault. He smelled like soap and salt and smoke.)

He didn’t miss a beat, and he didn’t look away from her. “Why’d you wanna dance?”

Lily jerked her chin up, a futile attempt to look down her nose at him. “Because,” she said slowly. “I waited for you. And tonight I was done waiting.” _ Because I wanted someone to touch me and remind me that I’m real, and present, and here. _

He didn’t accuse her of surrendering to Durant too easily, not this time. No, this time he devastated her in a different way: with the truth. “You looked lonely. Didn’t seem right.”

Lily’s first instinct was to snap at him, to tell him that he didn’t know anything about her and that she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself, thank you very much.

Her second instinct was to press her cheek to the worn leather of his waistcoat and sigh. It felt good to let him take her weight, to give herself the illusion that (just for a few seconds) she didn’t have to handle everything alone. Not that she wasn’t capable of it: just that she didn’t _ have _to.

Lightly, almost tentatively, Cullen ran a hand over her hair. “Miz. Bell. Lily?”

“I’m alright,” she said, straightening herself and taking a step back out of his arms. “I appreciate the dance, Mr. Bohannon. It was lovely.”

Then, as Lily watched with her eyes wide and her mouth open, Cullen Bohannon bowed, kissed the knuckles of her right hand, and _ winked. _ Before she’d recovered he’d sauntered away, swaggering like a man who’d never known loss in his life. 

Lily looked at his retreating shoulders, at her hand, and then up at the stars, twinkling above her. She may not be able to sleep, but she certainly didn’t feel alone any more.

~~~

“Sorry,” he mumbled into Lily’s hair. 

“It’s alright,” she told him, catching his wrists and placing his hands back on her hips where they’d been resting. 

“‘M’hands are rough,” he mumbled into the silence, probably trying to cover the sound of his callouses catching in the fine, lacy lawn of her chemise. 

She leaned back out of his hold just enough to look him in the eyes. “I know,” she whispered to him, her tone almost conspiratorial. “I like it,” she added, pressing closer again, letting her own long, delicate fingers glide up and down the groove of Cullen’s spine. 

“Lily-" 

He didn’t know what to say next. Didn’t know how to tell her about the shame and fear and lust fighting it out inside him. 

“It’s alright,” she repeated, and kissed him again. 

She kissed him like no other woman had, did Mrs. Lily Bell. The kisses were the opening salvo, sure, but what was made Cullen’s stomach clench was the way she touched him. Her fingers were light but deliberate as they traced along his hairline and over the plane of his cheekbone, mapping his face for her lips the way she mapped the route for their train: methodical and confident and beautiful in her self-possession. 

It wasn’t only the roughness of his hands that made Cullen feel unworthy of touching her. 

“You want this?” he asked, one last sop to his nerves. 

“Yes,” she said, sliding her lips to his cheek and from there to the shadow of his jaw. “Cullen, I’m sure.”

Good thing. One of them ought to be. 

He hadn’t been with anyone since Mary. He’d been able to do that for her, that one thing a husband should do. He’d given her his fidelity when he couldn’t give her his attention, his reassurance, his body, or his pride. 

And here he was now, with his hands on another woman. One who fascinated him in all her contradictions. One who touched him the way he hadn’t known he’d needed to be touched.

~~~

_ ‘I liked you better when I thought I knew you.’ _

_ I’m not angry because he has a past, _ Lily told herself, angrily yanking the pins out of her hair. _ I’m angry because he didn’t trust me with it. _

One of the pins caught in a ragged curl that, if Lily was going to be completely honest, smelled more like horse than soap. “Dammit,” she muttered, glaring at her flushed face in the shaving mirror. Her hair was straggling around her face in limp, tangled curls, and all she wanted was tea, a bath, and her bed. 

She could have exactly one of those three things.

Once she’d wrestled all six pins from her hair she took up her hairbrush and started at the ends. 

“It’s not like I’ve told him anything about myself,” she muttered to herself as she yanked the bristles roughly through her hair. “Not that he’s _ asked.” _

She wasn’t sure she wanted him to ask. She didn’t want to talk about Robert, or her life in London, or all of the horrible and wonderful things she’d seen since coming to America. If it hurt her to talk about her family, who were alive and well back in England, how much worse would it be for Cullen? Everyone he’d loved was dead. 

Guilt didn’t feel any better than anger, and now her hair was puffed out around her like a dandelion flower. With some amount of resignation Lily washed her face and used a bit of the leftover water to smooth her hair down before braiding it tightly. 

_ I’ll apologize to him tomorrow, _she told herself, sitting down on the edge of her bed to roll down her stockings. 

Someone knocked on her door. 

“Hold a moment!” she called, looking down to make sure her best green dress was still covering everything it should. 

“It’s me,” Cullen called. 

_ Oh. _

“Come in,” she said. It would be easier than keeping him cooling his heels outside. 

Cullen walked in slowly, looking around like he was expecting an attack. He was still in his evening clothes; that fine dark suit she hadn’t known he owned. It wasn’t fair: it wasn’t right that he could be so comfortable in any situation; could saunter in and be accepted at once, no matter where he was. It only made Lily feel more alienated than ever. Pauper or prince, maths or hammers, Cullen seemed capable of handling anything life threw at him.

“Brought you some coffee,” he said, holding out the tin percolator he carried. “Still hot.”

“I’m trying to get ready for bed,” said Lily, looking from the percolator to Cullen’s impassive face. “I’m afraid coffee isn’t exactly conducive to that.”

Cullen shrugged and set the coffee on the top of her unlit wood stove. “You said you liked me better when you thought you knew me. Figured I’d give you a chance to get to know me.” 

Lily studied him. He was looking at the toes of his boots with his hands deep in his pockets. For a man who usually looked at the world around him as though challenging it to a duel, this level of timidity was alarming. 

It was possible that Cullen was feeling the slightest bit shy. 

“I appreciate that,” said Lily, fiddling awkwardly with the seam of her skirt. “I- I want to apologize for earlier. I haven’t been forthcoming with my own past, and it wasn’t fair to expect that of you.”

Cullen nodded slowly. “All I got’s you and this job,” he said. “I’m gonna do my damndest to keep you both.”

Lily felt little prickles running up and down her arms. Coming from a man like Cullen, that was a promise, an oath that men in earlier times would have made over a roaring fire with a bloody knife in their hands. 

“You can have a seat,” she said, gesturing to the small wooden chair where she sometimes hung her coat.

She sat on the edge of the bed and, after a moment of hesitation, began rolling down her stockings. He was in _ her _place, and she should be comfortable. 

Cullen’s eyes were soft and easy he watched her. “Haven’t watched this in a long time,” he said. 

Lily set the first stocking to the side and started on the other. “It’s far more practical for me to be in breeches and boots most days, but I have to admit I rather miss dressing up every once in a while. Though, honestly, I can’t believe I ever thought I’d need a dress this formal on the railroad.”

“Needed it tonight, didn’t you,” said Cullen. “Stand up. I’ll unbutton you.”

Lily felt the prickles again when she turned her back on Cullen and bowed her head. She felt him move closer, could feel him weigh her braid in his hand before he gently tucked it over her shoulder and pressed the softest of kisses to the nape of her neck. She shivered, and told herself he didn’t notice it. 

Cullen’s blunt fingers worked slowly down the ridge of her spine, unhooking her as he went. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you with the Durants,” he said. “I just-”

“Cullen,” said Lily, smiling down at her toes. “The one thing I know about you is that you’ll never back down from a fight.”

“Huh,” Cullen said, more of a huff of air than a laugh. “Can’t say you’re wrong." 

Her dress was open from shoulder to waist, and his fingers were steadily unlacing her best corset now, the slightly-faded creation she’d worn beneath her wedding dress an eon ago. 

_What did intimacy feel like? _

It felt like standing calmly in front of Cullen as he gently undressed her. It was one thing to yank off clothes as they fell into bed, both too absorbed in the other person’s skin to be aware of their own nudity. It was another to have him strip away her anger and secrets and clothes one by one by one. 

“Thank you,” she said when he stepped back, leaving her holding her dress and corset to her chest with both hands. She could feel him watching her as she let the dress fall, pooling on the floor in waves of emerald silk. A gentleman wouldn’t have watched as she pulled her corset off over her head, folded it along the laces, and laid it over her battered trunk. 

He’d never claimed to be a gentlemen. Perhaps that was why she liked him. 

“Your turn,” she said, pivoting to face him for the first time since he’d kissed the nape of her neck. 

Cullen shrugged and watched her as she padded towards him. 

His neck tie was the first to go, her fingers deftly slipping the silk loose from its knot and sliding it free of his collar, which she unbuttoned to the divot of his clavicle bone. He didn’t say anything: just set one heavy palm on her hip and stood quietly. 

_ What did intimacy smell like? _

Like the smell of his skin, salty and warm. Like the smell of his clean linen: grassy and soft. Like his breath: cigars and whiskey, as much a part of him as the soft beard that tickled her fingers or the warmth of his body, luring hers ever closer to him. 

“There,” she said when he was down to his waistcoat, shirt, and trousers. 

“Thanks,” he told her. His voice was rough, and Lily tried to ignore how her nipples pressed against the thin lawn of her shift. 

“You’re welcome,” she told him before retreating to her bed. She curled against the headboard, knees up. “Here,” she said, patting the mattress. “It’s not like we haven’t shared it before.”

He took the footboard instead, stretching his long, long legs out beside her. “What’d you want to know?”

Lily had almost forgotten that he’d come to her because she’d accused him of being a stranger. His was a fair question. (It was an impossible question.)

There were all kinds of things she could ask him. _ How old was your son? Were you hurt in the war? When is your birthday? _

She _ could _ask those questions, but Lily was quickly realizing that absolutely none of the answers mattered. Whatever the answers were to those questions, she’d still want to wake up next to him in the morning. She couldn’t change the past. All they could do was hope to shape the future. 

“What do you miss the most?” she asked on impulse. “About - about normal life, before the world went mad.”

He cocked his head a little, those pale grey eyes focused on her face. “Peaches,” he told her after a thoughtful pause. “Summer asparagus. Apples, right off the tree. 

Lily blinked and then felt a slow smile creeping across her cheeks. “Fruits and vegetables?” she asked. “Really?”

“Yeah,” said Cullen, giving her a small, self deprecating shrug. “In the war, at first, we had meat. Bread, biscuits. By the end the men were eating grass.”

Lily looked at him, horror rising in her throat, but Cullen didn’t seem bothered. 

“Food’s a lot better on the railroad,” he said. “Three square meals, meat that wasn’t dead before you found it. Not a lot of asparagus, though.”

Lily didn’t know what to say. She and Robert had never been overly prosperous, but she’d never had to consider where her food came from. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, fingers twisting in her lap.

“Do I get to ask any of these questions? Or is this an interrogation?”

She was starting to recognize when he was teasing her. He didn’t smile, but something in those rebel-grey eyes went sly. 

“Fair’s fair,” she said, squaring her shoulders. 

“Why’d you come back? Packed up, said your goodbyes, caught a train. Back to Chicago, everyone said. And then here you are again. What brought you back?”

_ Right. This why why they’d never talked like this before. _

“I- my husband’s family was in Chicago. Mr. Durant took me to them, walked me to their door. All these women, judging me, blaming me for Robert’s death.” Lily remembered slapping her sister-in-law; could still feel the tingles in her palm. “If I had stayed there, stayed with them… I would have been useless. A reminder of something we all had lost.”

“Don’t you have kin back home?”

His warm palm had wrapped around the top of her foot, his thumb sneakily rubbing circles into the tendon running under her arch. It was soothing, and bewildering enough that Lily blurted out the truth. “They didn’t approve of me coming here,” she said. “And even if I went back, I’d turn my whole family into social pariahs. Rebellion isn’t tolerated in London society, I’m afraid.”

“Lucky for me I was born in Mississippi.”

Lily had a brief image of Cullen pacing a Mayfair parlour, all dark-clad feline grace and work-worn hands. The image was enough to draw a real smile from her. “Lucky for everyone, I think.”

“Aw, c’mon now,” said Cullen, pulling her heel up onto his thigh. “I ain’t that bad.”

“No,” said Lily softly, her gaze traveling up from his hands to his face. “You aren’t.”

For the space of several heartbeats, neither of them spoke. 

“I believe it’s my turn to ask a question,” said Lily, amazed that her voice wasn’t several octaves higher than normal. Cullen was rubbing her foot in earnest now, those callused thumbs pushing into the muscles of her feet and sending tingles of pleasure all through her system. It was ...strange, she decided. Strange to be treated like this when sex wasn’t on the table. Maybe he was a man who liked to keep his hands busy. 

(Maybe, under the anger and the grief, he was just kind.)

“Shoot,” said Cullen. 

“Why do you let people think you’re a simple soldier?”

He pulled a face and looked blankly down at his lap. “It’s easier,” he said. “But you must know something about that.”

“I can assure you,” said Lily dryly. “That I have never pretended to be less intelligent than I am.”

“No,” said Cullen, smirking a little. “You wouldn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Lily in mock-outrage. Was Cullen Bohannon flirting with her? It surely seemed like it. 

“That you don’t suffer fools,” he said shortly, moving his broad hands to her ankle. (Since when did her ankle hold so many nerves?) “But what I meant was that being underestimated, it can give you an advantage. You learn about your opponent before they learn about theirs.”

Lily raised an eyebrow. “Impressive,” she said. “And true.”

Cullen shrugged, those lean shoulders pulling his fine white shirt tight. “‘Sides. Ain’t like I’m the same man who had those tutors and manners and resources. Things change.”

“They always do,” said Lily quietly.

Cullen gently nudged her foot out of his lap, and Lily managed to swallow a particularly undignified sigh of disappointment. Cullen, mind-reader that he sometimes seemed to be, only smiled and picked up her previously neglected limb. 

“What do you want, Lily?” he asked, his face turned down towards his lap. 

He wasn’t looking at her, Lily thought. That meant this question mattered. 

“At the moment? A hot bath. All the way to my shoulders, with rosy French soap and one of those sponges from the Caribbean.”

Cullen smiled a little, and Lily saw one of those dimples wink. “Can’t fault your taste,” he said. “I wouldn’t pass up a bath either." 

“In the grand scheme of things? I want to see this road built. I want to do it for Robert, and to prove his horrid family wrong, and...”

Cullen’s thumbs kept kneading at her arch. “No house by the river for you, huh.”

“No,” said Lily softly, thinking of the expensive tablecloths and curtains that were still folded at the very bottom of her trunk. “No fine house for me. Is that- is that what you want?”

_ What would she do if he said yes? _

“Had that,” said Cullen shortly. “Didn’t want it. Now… don’t know what I want much beyond next week, next month. You and this job, ‘s all I need.”

“Do you love me, Mr. Bohannon?” It was out of her mouth before she could stop herself, much like the sins escaping from Pandora’s box. Like Pandora, there was nothing she could do to take it back.

He raised his eyes to hers. “No ma’am,” he said, his storm-colored eyes unflinchingly on hers. “Not yet.”

_ Not yet. _He didn’t love her, and she didn’t love him, but it was rumbling on the horizon, all roiling clouds and cooling rain and disorienting winds. It was there, and rushing towards them. 

All they could hope to do was weather it. 

_ What does hope look like; that lonely remnant in Pandora’s box? _

Like facing life’s storms together.


	2. Chapter 2

_ “Now join your hands, and with your hands your hearts.” _

_ -Shakespeare, King Henry VI _

* * *

Cullen looked up at the shadowy, peaked roof of his grubby canvas tent and listened to the breeze in the grass, the occasional faint shout from the saloon, and the gentle stamping of the corralled horses nearby. It was all familiar now, the night-time chorus that he had come to know after almost six months on the railroad. The evenings were getting cool now, and autumn was coming on fast: he could smell it in the morning dew, could hear it in the geese flying south, and could feel it in the body that ached so much more than it used to. 

He ought to be sleeping. He was as tired as he ever was, most men were. The railroad started at dawn and worked until they were out of supplies or daylight, whichever came first. 

He really should be sleeping, but instead he was laying awake, thinking on the conundrum that was Lily Bell. 

Hannah Durant was going to run Lily off one way or another. Lily could try to fight it, but that would only end ugly for everyone. Cullen wouldn’t put it past Hannah to have Lily shipped back east to an asylum. They’d call it hysteria, call it overwork and delusion, and not a goddamn person would lift a finger to help her. 

Cullen rolled onto his side, ignoring the way his hipbone dug through the thin pallet to the hard floorboards beneath. 

He could take her back east. She’d offered to live with him before, in the train car. He wasn’t proposing marriage, just… getting her somewhere safe. Someone had to look after her; the damn woman had the self-preservation instincts of a turkey. 

Cullen tried to imagine it. A house somewhere, a piece of land. A bed with Lily in it, horses in the barn, crops in the ground. 

The image didn’t fit. She didn’t belong inside, didn’t belong over a stove. 

(Cullen ignored the part of him that assumed that Lily  _ did  _ belong in his bed.)

No. Lily Bell belonged out under the impossibly wide arch of the prairie sky. Dammit, she could belong wherever she damn well chose because she was smart and tenacious and harder-working than most of the men Cullen had met. This railroad was just as much hers as it was his. They both wanted to see it built, they both wanted to challenge god and nature and the expectations of everyone else  _ and win.  _

He wanted her there when they crossed into California. He wanted that for her, wanted to see her smile and sly eyes and pure, unfettered glee. 

_ He could marry her.  _

Hannah Durant wouldn’t be able to send her away then. It wasn’t common for wives to follow their men out west, but a few did. She could work as a clerk, or maybe a telegrapher, or she could… 

It would kill her. It would kill her to watch the railroad getting built, day after day, and to know that her place in that titanic undertaking had been usurped. 

“Fuck it,” Cullen muttered, flopping onto his back again. This wasn’t a problem he could fix and he hated that, hated that more than he’d been able to hate anything in a long, long time. 

He lay there for a while longer, his back aching and his brain spinning with impossible ideas. Morning would come early, and more problems would come with it. 

Well. Leastways he and Lily could face them together. He’d been more honest than she knew when he told her that all he had was her and the job. Them two things? Only reason he didn’t fall into a bottle and never crawl his way back out.

_ Do you love me, Mr. Bohannon?  _

Damned if he didn’t have a clue. 

There was scuffling around the flap to his tent and his revolver was out of its holster and pointed at the entrance before he’d stopped to think. The figure who ducked through was slim and backlit by the nearly-full moon outside. 

“Lily?” he whispered, dropping the Colt as quick as he could. “What are you doing?”

She didn’t answer, just sat on the edge of his pallet and removed her hat, followed by the fine wool of her butternut coat. 

“Lily,” he said again, pushing up to his elbows so he could place a hand on her arm. “What-”

“Please let me stay,” she whispered, her voice rough. He couldn’t get a clear look at her face, not in the gloom of the tent, and if he lit the lantern everyone around would be able to see two silhouettes through the canvas, clear as day. He wanted to know if she’d been crying. 

“Well, come on,” he said, taking her shoulders and turning her to face him. 

It was strange, unbuttoning her clothes in near-total darkness. It made him so aware of the quick inhalations of her breath, the way her little fingers were digging into the washed-thin material of his work shirt. When she lifted her hips to let him slide her trousers down and off she sighed sharply, her breath puffing warm over his face. 

Finally, when she was down to her drawers and nothing else, he wrapped an arm around her waist and rolled her, snuggling her down into the warm spot left by his body and placing his own between her and the door. 

“Thank you,” she whispered, turning onto her side so that his nose was buried in her loosely braided hair and he could snug his body around the curve of her own. 

“Don’t thank me,” said Cullen, a little more roughly than he’d intended. “Don’t.”

He found the smooth skin of her arm under the covers and traced the back of his knuckles over the plane of her shoulder, the dip of her neck, and the edge of her stubborn jaw. From there he used only his fingertips, as lightly as he could: the parted curve of her lips, the proud little tilt of her nose, and yes: the feathery dampness of her dark lashes. 

The sound of his breath was incredibly loud in his own ears, and it was all Cullen could do to keep from wrapping his arm over her waist, burying his face in her neck, and crushing her back against him. He wanted to hold her like he’d never have to let her go. (He wanted to touch her like she could never be taken from him.) 

_ Selfish jackass,  _ he told himself.  _ Ain’t yours. She’s hers, and you’d best remember that.  _

“Cullen-” her voice was hardly louder than the breeze outside, a gentle puff of air that carried the weight of his hopes upon it. 

She didn’t want a baby. She’d told him so after that first night in his old sleeper car. (Hers, now.) Since he couldn’t even contemplate fatherhood a second time over he’d agreed, and kissed her silly, and then had slid down between her thighs to kiss her all over again. 

They had another week to go before he could fuck her properly, but that was next to nothing. Time was, not so long ago, that Cullen had thought he wouldn’t be able to touch anything else soft in his life. Lily was a wonder to him, a miracle straight from a fickle god. She soothed and challenged him, touched him and scolded him, and made him feel alive again. 

As the chill of the night crept in Cullen pulled her more tightly into him, his hand splayed on the vulnerable, tender softness of her belly, his thumb stroking slowly from side to side. She wasn’t soothing down, wasn’t falling asleep as she usually did in his arms. Maybe her brain was spinning too, desperate to find a way out of the trap Hannah Durant was springing. 

“Hush,” he told her, little tendrils of her hair tickling his lips. “Hush now.” 

He stroked his palm up over her ribs to the lush swell of a breast, cupping the warmth and weight in his palm. She was sensitive here, and shy, and he would never take for granted the way her breath hitched when he flicked the edge of his thumb over her nipple. 

“S’alright,” he told her, nuzzling his nose against the nape of her neck and pressing his lips to the fine skin there. “It’s alright.”

She sighed, low and steady, and leaned more of her weight against him, letting her head loll over his bicep and her makeshift pillow. 

_ Christ.  _ She melted into him, let him support her, allowed herself to go boneless and quiet against him. She found security and shelter in his body and it humbled him in a way nothing else had. It made him want to be worthy of this trust. (It also made him hard as a rail spike, but this wasn’t about that. This wasn’t about  _ him. _ )

“There you go sweetheart,” he told her, skimming his hand back down her body and slipping his fingers under the drawstring of her drawers as he stretched up to suck a kiss at the hinge of her jaw. Her sigh was a benediction, and part of him wanted to live in the moment forever. 

His fingers winnowed through curls to part her, finding her warm and soft and perfect, and Lily shifted against him, canting her hips to open for him, to let his palm rest familiarly over her mons. She was canny, his Lily. 

“Here,” said Cullen, shifting so that one his his legs was wedged between her own, providing her with a place to rest her thigh.

Lily rolled her head a bit, just enough to drop a kiss on the skin where she rested her cheek. Cullen pressed his face more tightly into her hair, until all he could smell was Lily, all he could feel was Lily, until his whole world had narrowed down to this dark tent, to this soft moment, to this woman in his arms. 

His first two fingers found the nub of her clit and circled there, marveling at how soft and warm she was, enjoying the sensation of having her pliant and quiet in his arms. She shuddered a little before relaxing again, and Cullen let his fingers circle and circle as he breathed her in. 

He never thought he’d have this again. It was more than her lithe form and crooked smiles: she trusted him to touch her with these hands, trusted him to pleasure her, trusted him to go no further than she wished. It was that feeling of faith that made him feel whole again. Maybe the first men had felt like this when they built fires and dragged meat back to their caves: like they would do anything to be worthy of their lady’s trust. 

She dampened on his fingers and Cullen listened in aroused contentment as her breath quickened, high little gasps that had him pressing his face into the curve of her neck again. 

She was perfect. His wrist started to ache but Cullen didn’t care, because where she’d been damp and warm Lily was now slick and hot, her thighs shivering, her hips pressing gently forward and back. He clenched his teeth, ignored the urge to finish in his drawers like a thirteen year old boy, and kept the pressure steady on her clitoris. 

She came silently, going still against him and holding her breath as she went molten and flushed around Cullen’s still fingers. 

He kissed her cheek, rubbed his nose over the delicate dip of her temple, and then withdrew his hand as she trembled, just a little, her held breath whooshing out of her in a satisfied feminine huff. 

When she wriggled Cullen loosened his grip on her. “Don’t have to go,” he told her, wiping his fingers on his own thigh while Lily turned in his arms. 

“I’m not going,” she said, pushing him gently so that he was on his back and she could use the dip of his shoulder as a pillow. She was a soft, warm, relaxed weight against him, and Cullen wished he could see her face: flushed cheeks, sleepy eyes, escaping little curls to halo around her. 

“Alright then,” he told her, running a palm slowly up and down her back. “You stay right there.”

“Missed you.” Her answer was slow and lazy, more a feeling than a sound as her breath feathered warm over the skin of his chest. 

“Missed you too,” he whispered to her. 

She mumbled something and hitched the blanket higher under her chin. Cullen could feel her slim fingers curl into a little fist which rested over the steady beating of his traitorous heart. 

He kept stroking her back, the movement as soothing for him as it was for her, and let his eyes fall shut. Lily had faith in him. Faith he didn’t deserve, but she gave it anyways: he reckoned that was grace, pure and simple. He’d try to be worthy of it. He’d try to be worthy of  _ her.  _

~~~

“C’mon,” said Cullen, leading her to her already saddled horse. “There’s something I want to show you.”

“What is it?” she asked, bouncing on the ball of her foot before swinging up into the saddle and gathering Gulliver’s reins. 

“Just come on,” said Cullen, smiling at her before kicking his gelding into a rocking canter. It was a sunny, early-autumn Sunday afternoon: she should be doing her washing, or writing a letter, or painstakingly copying out the surveying differentials she’d taken in the last week. 

What she  _ shouldn’t  _ be doing was riding out over the plains with Cullen and no idea as to where she was going. There was a reason she was out west _ ,  _ Lily thought to herself. She never had been able to say no to an adventure. 

Twenty minutes or so outside of camp Cullen slowed his horse to a walk and waited for Lily and Gulliver to come abreast of him. “It’s just over that rise,” he told her. “I found it when John McCreery and I rode out hunting earlier in the week.”

“What is it?” she asked again, squinting into the low afternoon sun. 

“You’ll see,” said Cullen, and oh- he was smiling, those stupid dimples gracing his cheeks, and he looked years younger and a whole war lighter. Whatever it was he wanted to show her, it wouldn’t compare to this. 

At least she thought it wouldn’t. Then they crested the hill. 

Lily had grown up in London. There were buildings everywhere, and long tree-lined parks and streets. The English countryside contained plenty of rolling hills, but there was always a stand of trees or a clump of cottages somewhere on the horizon. New York and the American east coast had been similar: trees and farmland and cities, all orderly in their way. 

Nothing had prepared her for the magnitude of the plains. And even all these months later, she wasn’t ready for this. 

Beneath them wildflowers in every imaginable color rioted down a gentle slope to the stream below. Beyond the stream were more flowers and grasses and space, stretching on and on until the land met the domed, deep-summer sky. 

“Oh, Cullen,” said Lily, swinging off her horse without tearing her eyes from the view. “It’s lovely.”

“Thought you’d like it,” he said simply, and then Lily had to turn to him. 

He’d dismounted as well and was standing beside her here, at the threshold to this localized Eden. A little smile toyed with the corner of his mouth, and those grey eyes were devastatingly soft. 

Some men brought women flowers, a little tick checked on the list of social niceties a gentlemen was to observe. 

Romantics among the males of the species might gather the bouquet themselves, tailoring it to their lady’s taste. 

Cullen had given her this: a small adventure, the riot of color, the experience of seeing the honey-warm sunshine pouring over the flowers below. He hadn’t brought her a fistful of blooms: he’d brought her to a garden, to the magnificence of the wilds that drew them both west. 

“Thank you,” she whispered, and then she turned to him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him. 

It was a heady thing, to taste Cullen’s smile. 

Until this point Cullen had always kissed her like he expected her to walk away at any point; like she was a breakable thing that he was trying to respect. Not this time: now he kissed her with an edge, hooking a forearm behind her so he could bend her back and kiss her more deeply, all beard and teeth and tongue. It was the kiss of a self-satisfied scoundrel, and Lily had the sensation of something that had been missing falling into place. 

“Cullen,” she said, high and breathless when they finally pulled apart for air. “We really ought to tether the horses.”

She still held Gulliver’s reins, but he was tugging at them as he cropped clover and grass and little purple flowers, looking for all the world like some kind of pastoral watercolor. 

Cullen leaned in to kiss Lily again, just a sweet, quick press of his lips to hers. “You’re right,” he said. “Unless we wanna walk home.”

Lily turned to look back towards camp, admiring the way the land rolled and waved as though it had been formed by primordial winds that had torn across the young planet. Cullen hobbled the horses and then walked up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist and resting his chin on the top of her head.

“Makes a man feel small,” he said. Lily could feel his words rumbling in his chest and through to hers, the effect not unlike that of a large cat’s purr. 

“It’s a relief, in a way,” Cullen continued. “It’s bigger than us and our wars. Been here forever; be here after we’re gone.”

“You’re something of a poet,” said Lily, turning in his arms to press her cheek against his. 

Cullen huffed a laugh and stroked his palm down her back. She’d realized that though he didn’t cling, Cullen was a toucher. He’d run his knuckles down her arm when he came to call the surveying crew in for supper, he’d stroke her hair when they fell asleep curled up together, and sometimes he’d reach out as though he was checking to make sure she was here and warm and real. 

She knew why he wanted to reassure himself. She did the same thing, too. 

Lily turned to look down at the flowers glorying beneath them. “Will it be worth it, do you think? All of the pain and struggles to build the road?”

Cullen was quiet beside her, so she looked over at him. He shrugged and glanced away, scanning the landscape. “Way I see it,” he said eventually, looking back at her. “It already is.”

That stole the air from her lungs. Maybe there was some poet in him; some chivalrous gene passed (ever so reluctantly) down. It was a heavy statement here in the sunshine and flowers, one Lily didn’t want to have to think about until later when she was still and centered and alone. It was a day too pretty for philosophy: they’d found some beauty. Now they needed to have some fun. 

“You’re it,” said Lily, shoving him in the chest, and then she was running down the hill as quickly as she could manage, one hand holding her straw hat to her head. It made her heart race, and the flowers were up nearly to her hips, and- 

She didn’t hear Cullen chasing her. Maybe he didn’t want to play. Robert usually hadn’t, and then Lily would spend her afternoon embarrassed and frustrated. It wasn’t that he judged her for trying, he just-

Cullen had already dropped his hat in the grass by his saddlebags, and he was shrugging off his waistcoat. His eyes were focused on her, the grey turned to molten silver, and Lily felt a shiver run the whole length of her spine. Cullen wanted to  _ play. _

“Ready or not,” he called, but Lily had already turned her back on him and had started to run. 

She sprinted through the wildflowers, leaving petals and lazy, late-summer honeybees trailing in her wake. Her hat had flown off a hundred heartbeats ago, and she could hear Cullen now, his footsteps quickly gaining on hers. The stream glinted up ahead and Lily swerved, enjoying the pull of her muscles and the slight burn of her lungs. Maybe the nymphs of old had felt like this: running through a perfect, unsullied landscape with destruction nipping at their heels. 

The only difference, really, was that Lily wanted to be caught. 

Cullen snagged her by the back of her butternut coat, yanking her back and tumbling her with him into the grass and flowers. They rolled, his arms bracketed around her, and when they finally stopped she was sprawled on his chest in a little nest of crushed flowers. Tall grasses surrounded them, wrapping them in sunshine and intimacy, and Cullen was smiling down at her. “Gotcha,” he said. 

Lily pushed up on her elbows, canted her lips over his, and kissed him with everything that was rioting around inside her. This was joy: this unselfconscious wanting and happiness and contentment. She poured it into her kiss, fisting her fingers in the length of his hair and the worn cotton of his shirt. 

“Lily,” he said, cupping her cheek and running his nose along the edge of her jaw. “Slow down, sweetheart. We got all day.”

It didn’t feel like they had all day. This moment felt as fleeting as the sun in the sky, and Lily wanted the reassurance of his skin against hers. She pushed back until she was straddling the hard plane of his belly, her knees digging into the ground by his ribs. 

His hands scrubbed up her thighs, his fingers gripping tight enough to dent the muscle there, but he looked up at her calmly, almost lazily. “Maybe you caught me,” he told her with a crooked grin. 

Lily shucked off her coat before unbuttoning his shirt, pushing it aside to reveal the flesh beneath. “Maybe I did.”

He was content to let her undress him, and then herself, all the while watching her here with those pale, soft eyes. “I thought about trying to get you away from here,” he told her as she rose to kick off her boots and shuck off her pants. “Thought about reconsidering living with you, getting you away from the fucking Durants.”

Lily stilled and looked down at him. He was sitting up, unlacing his boots and tossing them off to the side. 

“Where-”

He interrupted the question, glancing up at her while she stood over him topless and surprised. “Figured you’d hate me for it,” he continued before pushing up to his feet and shoving his suspenders from his shoulders. He wasn’t touching her, and yet her skin was warming as though he had. 

“You don’t belong trapped in any man’s house,” he told her. “I’ve been wanting you outside like this, wearing nothin’ but the sky, since you took over surveying for the road.”

He was still undressing, unbuttoning his fly and shoving his trousers to the ground along with his shirt. It didn’t seem to bother him, being naked outside under the sun. He seemed so comfortable, while Lily stood frozen, absorbing what he’d just told her. 

Had anyone ever understood her this way? Had she? She  _ wanted  _ the thrill of finding out what was over the next ridge, wanted to live where ballroom manners could go hang, wanted a man who didn’t want to control her or stifle her or disrespect her opinions. 

Cullen gathered her close, pressing her against him from hip to chest, and dropped a kiss to her forehead. “Huh,” he muttered, smiling down at her. “Only took that to shut you up.”

Lily blinked and then smacked his shoulder. “You were doing so well, Mr. Bohannon,” she told him, going up on tiptoe to kiss him. 

“Bet I can do better,” he said, pressing a kiss to her temple as his fingers traced the waistband of her trousers from her hips inward to her fly. He made quick work of the buttons and then she was wriggling them down and stepping out of her clothes, as naked and confident as Eve. 

Cullen picked her up, and Lily’s legs wrapped around his waist in a gesture older than clothes and society and time. Cullen gently sank to his knees and then lay back, kissing her all the while, until they were back where they’d started: surrounded by sweet-smelling grass with Lily astride his belly. 

When they broke apart he smirked up at her. “Now I don’t want any fussing about this, alright?”

Before Lily could ask what he meant to do he’d grabbed her hips and dragged her along his chest and over his jaw, and Lily had barely registered the embarrassment that her wet cunny had rubbed all along him when he set his mouth to that very part of her anatomy. 

“Oh!” Lily stiffened in surprise but Cullen still had a grip on her hips and kept her right where he wanted her, pushing up into her cunt with his mouth and chin.

Robert had used his mouth on her a few times, but never with her balanced over him like this. It had been soft and sweet and almost lazy: everything that this was not. Cullen was mouthing at her like he wanted to consume her, and his hands were urging her hips forward and back, rocking her along his jaw like a boat swept along on the ocean tides. 

“Cullen-” she couldn’t catch her breath or her balance, and it was all she could do to find a fistful of his hair and hang on tight. One of his hands slid around to cup her arse, holding her up and in place, and the other hand traced down the crease of her hip to her cunt. He thumbed her open wider and Lily saw the angle of his head shift and then, oh hell, he was driving her farther and farther up, making the muscles in her belly twitch and her thighs shake. 

She knew he was taking pleasure from her reaction; from his ability to make her weak and wet and wanting. She really couldn’t blame him, not when it felt so good. It wasn’t an act of dominance: this was an act of worship, a pagan ritual reenacted out among the bounty of the earth. 

“Cullen-” Her voice was high and broken as she called his name, and then she was coming, waves of pleasure whiting out her vision and making her cunt clench and her muscles go loose. She would have slumped forward but Cullen was already there, a big hand bracing against the center of her chest as he nosed at her gently, waiting for her hips to cease their desperate little movements. 

“My god,” she mumbled, and then he was rolling her off of him and laying her down at his side. When he swiped his arm across his shining mouth she blushed so violently the pink glow could probably be seen from camp. 

“You- how?” asked Lily, still trying to get her brain to function properly.

“I’m gonna take that as a compliment,” said Cullen, propping himself up on one arm and grinning down in smug satisfaction. 

Lily had a few tricks, too. In retaliation she swiped her fingers through her swollen, soaked folds and then wrapped her sticky hand around Cullen’s cock. He’d been patient these past weeks, pleasuring her twice as often as he’d accepted it in return, but today Lily wasn’t going to settle for mouths and half-measures. 

(Not that his mouth was any kind of consolation prize. No, women of the world would go to war for a chance to experience those soft lips.)

She’d woken that morning with tender breasts and an ache in her back, and she knew her flux was only a few days away. They could enjoy this afternoon, like the first man and woman back in their Eden. 

Cullen huffed and his hips jerked forward as she ran her fist up and down the length of his cock. “Lily, we don’t-”

“We don’t  _ have  _ to do anything,” she told him, catching her second wind. “But there are several things I’d very much like to do.”

“Yeah?” asked Cullen, running his hand up her belly to toy with one flushed pink nipple. 

Lily wrapped her fingers a little more tightly around the head of his cock. “I’ve missed this,” she said, leaning in for a kiss. He tasted like her, musky and salty, and Lily found she didn’t mind at all. 

Cullen bent his head to worry her breasts with his teeth and tongue, and Lily sighed as arousal began to course through her system again. 

_ What did love smell like?  _

Cullen nudged her legs apart and settled himself between them, her hips cradling his in an embrace older than language itself. He slid home slowly, pressing kisses to the underside of her jaw as he went, making room for himself in her cunny and head and heart. 

He set an easy pace and Lily hitched her legs up over his hips, rocking up to meet him, both of them willing to make this moment last as long as it could. 

_ Love smelled like wildflowers and sex and summer-dry grass.  _

“Lily-” His eyes went desperate and she kept hers on his as long as she could, until his blunt fingers worked their way between them and circled her clit, driving her over the edge again.

She turned her face into his throat as she came, clinging to his shoulders and mouthing love-words into his sweat-dampened skin. He followed close behind her, sliding out and spattering come onto her stomach, the palm of one big hand cupping the back of her head as he whispered her name. 

She wondered if he’d heard her. She wondered if it mattered. 

Cullen slid to the crushed grass beside her, panting like a bellows, one hand wrapped tightly around hers. There were no tears, not like that first time. This was all contentment and joy and satisfaction. 

“These past couple weeks with you- it’s the happiest I’ve been in a long, long time. I want you to know that.” He was stroking the back of his fingers over her throat, and Lily suddenly wasn’t sure that there wouldn’t be tears after all. He was a tough man, Cullen Bohannon, but under all that Lily suspected he carried a rather tender heart. 

(Later, when the guilt set in, she’d try to decide if she was worth that tenderness.)

“You make me happy too,” she whispered. 

Cullen kissed her, butterfly light, and then pushed himself to his feet. Bathed in the evening light he looked like some kind of avenging god: all sun-bronzed skin and work-formed muscles and stubborn, human determination. 

The moment passed when he turned and pulled her up beside him. “Stream’s right there,” he said, pointing. “And I’ve got some soap in my saddlebags.”

“You remembered,” said Lily, watching the muscles in his arse pull as he walked, totally nude, up the slope to retrieve his pack. “You remembered that I wanted a bath.”

“Ain’t hard,” he said, stopping to pat her on the behind. “C’mon. This time of year, water outta be warm enough.”

It wasn’t the hot bath she’d wanted, but the water was warm enough to tolerate, the soap smelled like thyme, and Cullen scrubbed her back. As far as Lily was concerned, she’d gotten the better end of the deal. 

~~~

His whole life, Cullen had never considered himself a coward. Lily had had the right of it when she said that the one thing she knew was that he’d never run from a fight. He hadn’t run from a fight, but he was running from feelings like a yellow-bellied cur. 

Lily had told him that she loved him out there in that field. He’d written them off as sex-words, something she’d said in the heat of the moment. She didn’t love him; couldn’t love him. He made her feel safe, no shame in that. There was a difference between love and like, and love and respect. 

He liked her. He respected her. Nothing more to it. 

She stirred in the bed next to him, her breath hitching and her little fingers clenching and unclenching where they rested on his chest. 

Cullen froze, holding his breath and keeping still like she could read his goddamned mind. 

She settled again, a gentle weight against his side, and Cullen breathed out in a relieved whoosh. 

_ You got it bad, son,  _ he told himself. Gingerly he reached for her, tracing her cheekbone with the tip of one finger. Ain’t no way this woman loved him. 

_ Sure,  _ he thought, looking at the way her lashes curved along her cheek.  _ But her not loving you’s got nothing to do with how you feel ‘bout her. _

What the hell did he know about love? He’d gotten married at twenty-nine to a woman he’d known most of his life. He’d seen her in the Methodist church on Sundays, or at dances in the summer when the weather was fine. It had been… expected. He liked her, he respected her, and- dammit. 

He wasn’t gonna sully his memories of Mary and Joshua, cause both of them had deserved a damn sight better than him. Suffice to say, he’d loved them. (Loved them enough to avenge them. Loved them enough to kill in their name to make  _ himself  _ feel better.)

Lily deserved someone a hell of a lot better than him. 

Some part of Cullen wasn’t going along with the self-flagellation. It was the same instinct that told him when to duck and when to retreat, and he’d learned to ignore it as his peril. 

It told him that it didn’t matter what he deserved. Wasn’t that what Ruth talked about? You can’t stop someone from forgiving you. It ain’t about you. What mattered here was what Lily wanted. 

And she wanted him. Only question left was whether he wanted her too, and of course he did. He might play at being stupid, but he wasn’t a fool. Good woman like this wants you, you say  _ thank you, ma’am,  _ and step up. 

_ Fuck.  _

He was already wrapped up in knots about her, already trying to protect her, already looking for ways to make her smile and gasp and blush. 

Yeah, he had it bad. Ain’t no use lying about it, specially to himself. God help him, he loved this woman, and he was prepared to do just about anything to preserve that. 

He turned his head to press a kiss to her brow, smiling a little when her fingers tightened on his chest again. 

Of course he loved her. He’d tell her again in the morning, when he could watch her eyes go dark and her cheeks flush pink. They’d build this road side by side, and whatever came after? They’d be together for that, too. 

~~~

He should have known. 

He’d never promised to protect her, and yet he hated himself for not being there when she needed him. 

He’d never promised to cherish her, and yet he did, laying her down on the back pew of Miss Ruth’s church as gently as he could. Didn’t matter though: she couldn’t feel it. 

He’d never promised her  _ until death do us part,  _ though he grieved as though he had. 

His were the hands that built her coffin, hammering nails into pine; iron and wood together just like the railroad: the project to which she’d given everything she had. 

His were the hands that dug her grave, that stabbed the shovel-point into the prairie sod, turning over dark, deep earth that smelled like death and forgotten things. 

His were the hands that marked her grave: a rough wooden cross almost lost among the wildflowers that rioted around it, all color and hope and sun- the things she’d brought into his life. 

_ Do you love me, Mr. Bohannon?  _

Oh, he had. His were the hands that had loved her. And his were the hands that buried her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Shows up five years late with Starbucks.*
> 
> Thank you for taking the time to read this story of mine! _Hell On Wheels_ was recommended to me by the stupendous [Sophie,](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciosophia/pseuds/sciosophia/works) who was kind enough to beta read this fic. If you're obsessed with Ansen Mount, I highly suggest you read her _Star Trek: Discovery _ story. It'll fuck you up, but I promise you'll like it.__
> 
> _  
_If you'd like to scream with me about Hell On Wheels, Marvel, or Star Wars (sorry, Game of Thrones is in time-out) I'm [on twitter.](https://twitter.com/caseydoesfandom)_  
_
> 
> __  
_Thanks again for giving my story a chance!  
<3 Casey_  



End file.
